I should know this by now: No matter how much of a head start I get, when it comes down to the night before the movers arrive, there are still a million things left to do. We could stay up all night and I would find more ways to prepare. Josh made us stop and go to bed, but I still need to pull things off the walls, move our luggage into the “safe room” (labeled with a DO NOT PACK sign), and catch the cat and put him in his crate in the safe room — ever since our very first PCS when the moving class instructors told us a horror story of a family’s cat getting taped up inside a box and shipped to Japan, that’s always on my Must Do list . . .
There are more things I could throw away, garden tools to corral, and did I pack the right clothes for 3-4 months? Did the dog’s medicine get set aside so we can deliver it to the kennel when we drop him off on Monday? Where are the passports and my car keys? There’s an endless list of things that I could do, but just like having a baby, it’s happening, whether I’m ready or not. At the end of the day it will all end up on the truck, for better or worse.
No matter how much I purge, I’m still going to end up on the other side with all these boxes thinking, “Why do I still have 2 strainers? And how do I have 46 pens that don’t write anymore? Who needs this many shoes?!” and “Why do I not own a single lamp? Time to go to IKEA.” And the work will continue, just as it did the 12 times before.
But for the first time, there’s no end of tour date posted in the future. I have no idea if we’re moving in for 1 year or 8. I guess we’ll see how the first year goes and figure it out from there.